Your Thoughts Create Your Feelings

Have you ever wondered why you feel a certain way about a certain person or thing? Maybe you can't quite place what makes you uncomfortable or uneasy about someone or something. Or why you might go-to a strawberry milkshake as a source of comfort when you're feeling sad. Your subconscious mind is a databank that holds all your experiences, memories, base thoughts, and root beliefs. Our subconscious mind is always working, and always recording what's going on around us, wether we're aware of it or not. Understanding our subconscious programming is the key to understanding ourselves, and gives us the power to change patterns, habits and beliefs that aren't serving us any good.

It is important to understand that all of our feelings, positive and negative, are generated responses based on our conscious and unconscious thoughts. For instance, if someone shares something with you and suddenly you feel like you have to walk on eggshells or defend yourself, it isn't the person's words that produced those feelings in you. It was your own unconscious thoughts related to the person or what they said that caused you to feel defensive.

For example, if your partner expressed having a bad day at work then came home and was mean, snapping at you for every little thing, and taking their displaced anger out on you, then you might feel like you have to walk on eggshells the next time your partner, or even a friend, or family member tells you they had a bad day at work. Based on your past experience with someone telling you they had a bad day at work, your subconscious associated "bad day at work", with being mistreated. The feeling of walking on eggshells was created in your mind based on your subconscious thoughts, as a direct result from your experience.

I tend to think of feelings as visitors, passing through. They aren't staying, but while they're present, sit with them and find out what they have to tell you or teach you. Feelings can be great teachers, helping us understand ourselves a little better. It's important to remember that feelings are fluid and are ever changing. A person may experience many different feelings in a day. A pregnant person may even experience the full range of human emotion in a single day. Each feeling is connected to a thought, belief, or experience, often in our unconscious mind.

On a personal note, after my beloved Grandmother passed, I noticed that when I was feeling sad I started craving strawberry milkshakes. I'm not a big milkshake person, but if I'm going to have one, it's going to be strawberry. Why did I suddenly start craving strawberry milkshakes? Or alternatively to milkshakes, I found myself ordering a scoop of strawberry ice cream more than I was getting any other flavor. It wasn't a conscious act, but when I became consciously aware of it, I decided to do some internal digging.

I discovered my finding strawberry ice cream and milkshakes comforting, was because when I was a little girl, my Grandmother used to take me to a small family owned market, called Norman Brothers down in South Miami. They made fresh milkshakes to go, and every time we went to Norman Brothers, she got me a strawberry milkshake. My Grandmother was my MVP who always made me feel safe and special. Even though she lived a good life, a long life, and I know she's happy to be reunited with her family of origin and husband, losing her in 2024 was devastating to me. There are days when the cloud of grief sits heavy above my head. So now when I'm sad, and especially when the grief cloud is hanging around, strawberry milkshakes give me a little comfort due to the subconscious association with my Grandmother.

Strawberry milkshake as a source of comfort

If you have some feelings you don't quite understand, but would like to discover the root of, hypnotherapy might be a good option for you. In a hypnotherapy session, we can access the subconscious mind directly, bypassing the critical mind and find the root belief or experience behind the feeling. When we change the mental association, we can change the thought and likewise, affect the feeling too. If you think hypnotherapy might be a good option for you to explore, book a 15 minute free consultation and let's talk about it.